Month: January 2018

After writing up Nintendo's Wednesday reveal of its new Labo playsets (coming April 20 to the US and Japan and April 27 to Europe), I realized I'd forgotten to add an important word to the article's introduction: "what."

More specifically, the drawn-out, question-marked version I shouted when the product's reveal video played out. ("Whaaaaat?!") I'm a big fan of Nintendo's physical-toy era in the '60s and '70s, back when company legend and Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi came up with engineering wonders like the Ultra Hand and the Ten-Billion Barrel Puzzle. As a result, I was immediately charmed by the physicality and toy-controller possibilities of the reveal video, which included everything from a motorcycle steering chassis to a 13-key piano to a string-loaded fishing rod—all built by players with a mix of pre-cut, pre-marked cardboard, sensing stickers, plastic, string, and more.

But then I began wondering: exactly how does everything work with Nintendo Labo? In particular, what the heck is going on with Labo's most insane offering: a full-body robot suit?

Enlarge (credit: Steve Johnson)

The Federal Communications Commission is making its latest determination of whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans quickly enough, and there are a few notable tidbits from what we know about the report so far.

The FCC today released a fact sheet on the draft Broadband Progress Report and a statement by Chairman Ajit Pai, but not the actual draft report.

Pai's FCC has determined that mobile broadband is not a full substitute for home Internet services. The FCC says this even after previously suggesting that mobile Internet might be all Americans need. The FCC also won't be lowering the speed standard that it uses to judge whether broadband deployment is happening quickly enough.

Enlarge / Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli. Jail for him, competition for his kind. (credit: Getty | Drew Angerer )

For four of the country’s largest hospital systems, enough is enough.

Sick of drug companies’ eye-popping price hikes and ridiculous shortages, the feisty hospital systems announced Wednesday that they’ve banded together and formed an unnamed non-profit to make their own steady supply of affordable generic medicines.

The leading hospital system, Intermountain Healthcare, released a statement explaining:

Enlarge / Philadelphia miner Matthew Freilich shared this picture of his mining rig, which contains eight Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics cards. (credit: Matthew Freilich)

The market for high-end graphics cards used to work like the market for almost any other piece of computer gear. You'd go to your local electronics store, pick one up off the shelf, and pay an amount right around the manufacturer's suggested retail price.

But the rise of cryptocurrency mining has created an unprecedented global shortage of graphics cards. If you go to your local retailer, you're likely to find bare shelves where the beefier cards used to be. Instead of trading at a discount, used cards routinely sell for well above MSRP on sites like eBay and Craigslist.

And it's driving PC gamers—who used to be the primary market for these cards—crazy.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list features a slew of deals on laptops from Dell, Lenovo, and Asus, including Asus model that comes with a 8th-gen Core i5 chip, 1080p display, 8GB of RAM, and a USB-C port for $500. Beyond the PC, we've also got an Amazon-certified refurbished version of Amazon's latest Fire TV Stick for $30, which is $10 off its non-refurbished going rate.

The rest of the discount smorgasbord covers Apple's 12.9-inch iPad Pro, various 4K TVs, and the usual array of smart home gear. You can take a look for yourself below.

(credit: TechBargains)

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Featured Deals

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

For the first time, Samsung is manufacturing GDDR6 memory in mass quantities. The memory is faster and more efficient than the GDDR5 memory it succeeds, and it will likely appear on PC graphics cards this year.

Samsung's GDDR6 memory is based on the company's 10-nanometer technology and offers double the density of the company's 20-nanometer GDDR5 offerings, meaning 16 gigabits instead of eight gigabits. The company promises an 18Gbps pin speed and transfer rates of up to 72GB/s. Further, the new chips will run at 1.35V. The GDDR5 predecessor has a pin speed of 9Gbps and runs at 1.55V.

The result should be significantly faster video cards for gaming and other tasks like video processing and Ethereum mining, if you're into that sort of thing. Samsung's press release says that "immediate production of GDDR6 will play a critical role in early launches of next-generation graphics cards and systems." The GDDR6 chips Samsung is producing will generally edge out what we're currently seeing in GDDR5X in terms of performance.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Brian A. Jackson)

An iPhone application that attempts to detect whether ISPs are throttling online services was rejected by Apple when its developer tried to get it into the company's App Store.

David Choffnes, a Northeastern University professor who researches distributed systems and networking, built an app called "Wehe" that tests the speeds of YouTube, Amazon, NBCSports, Netflix, Skype, Spotify, and Vimeo. Abnormally low speed results for one or more of those services might, in theory, provide evidence that your mobile carrier is throttling a service.

But as Motherboard reported today, Apple refused to let the app into the iPhone App Store, telling him that "your app has no direct benefits to the user." Motherboard was able to test a beta version of the app using Apple's TestFlight platform and provided this screenshot of the application in action: